Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Nice older book in good condition. Pages in excellent condition. Images are beautiful bright and vivid. No notes or highlighting. See images. Fantastic book.

About the book >.>.> A painter might compete with the best of his peers or in the case of the really ambitious and gifted with the Old Masters themselves; but now the cele- brated dissolution of the boundary between art and life compelled the artist to compete with the politician for power with the factory for productivity and with pop culture for sensation and novelty. Perhaps most pernicious the drive toward novelty which began to seem impossible to attain within the strictly delimitative conven- tions of easel painting was further encouraged by the two dominant critical concepts of the sixties and seventies: the first was the idea that quality was in some way inextricably linked to or even a by-product of innovation; the second was that since quality was not definable art only needed to be interesting instead of good. These two crudely positivistic formulations of critical criteria did more to discourage serious art and its appreciation than any amount of indifference in the preceding decades. Th definition of quality as something that required verification to give criticism its authority con- tributed to the identification of quality with innovation. For if quality judgments had any claim to objectivity they had to be based on the idea that an artist did something first – an historical fact that could be verified through documentation. (LL)